From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 23:07:35 -0500 We complain a lot about Elsevier and other large commercial publishers making a lot of money out of their dominant control of STEM journal publishing, but from a historical perspective shouldn't we be blaming ourselves for allowing this development to come about? The first publications issued by the first university press to be founded and exist continuously since then in the late 19th century were journals in mathematics and chemistry. There is no good reason that universities themselves couldn't have scaled up their publishing programs when research boomed after WWII and entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell entered the arena to begin their commercial businesses. But, for whatever reason, universities failed to invest more in their own presses, and the vast majority of universities decided to play free rider on the some sixty presses that then existed instead of financially investing in expanding the system themselves. Had they done so, control of STEM publishing would have remained firmly in the hands of the academic community. Instead of a Project Muse (a joint project of the press and library at Hopkins) just existing for HSS publishing, it would have existed for STEM publishing as well. Now, having allowed the genie of commercial STEM publishing to escape from the bottle, we face the daunting prospect of trying to force it back in. It is sad that it takes a rogue enterprise like Sci-Hub to rattle the system when the plight we face did not have to exist in the first place. Sandy Thatcher From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 12:57:46 +0000 I don't think you are being fair, Joe; David is asking a legitimate question, although it is also true that he is pointing out some boilerplate rhetoric that actually does not, and is not intended, to have much meaning. Your argument that all law must be obeyed lest our social institutions be undermined is very similar, in my mind, to those who say that we must crack down on all undocumented residents in the U.S. simply because they are "illegal." But the law has not always been the same as it is now, and it could be changed. We could be more generous, legally, to undocumented aliens, as we once were, and we could be more generous to users of copyrighted content, as we once were. As to David's question, surely we can ask if users of scientific articles are better off because they have more avenues of access to scholarship? If we determine that they are, perhaps the laws, or the norms of how scholarship is disseminated, should change. If scholars did not give their copyrights away, Sci-Hub might not be illegal, depending on how articles were licensed. Rather than simply asserting that what is good for Elsevier is good for scholarship, Sci-Hub, as well as other developments in the scholarly communications ecosphere, challenge us to reconsider the system as a whole, and what changes might make it better. Just to be clear, I don't want Elsevier to fail, nor do I want to do away with copyright. But I would like Elsevier to have a much less dominant say in how scholars work, and I would like copyright to be a benefit to authors, rather than an obstacle to them after it has been given away. David's questions points us toward those kinds of consideration, IMO. Kevin Kevin L. Smith, J.D. Dean of Libraries University of Kansas